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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

> Cliche-driven, over-metaphor'd, statistically-average purple-purpose

That's high literature for you. That's why so few people read it. Most prefer more down to Earth books, but AI doesn't default to that style.

The problem for AI might be that humans wrote very few good books. If you train a model for literary purposes you should weight training material by quality. Which is hard to evaluate.

> It's sad, really, that we're many years into this entire thing and it still can't produce something that doesn't have my eyes drifting from the page

Since internet happened, I have this problems with 98% of human written books. A book must have some very strong hooks to keep me reading till the end. "Blindsight" barely made the cut.

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That's not what high literature is. That's like looking at some clever linux kernel code and dismissing it in favor of a small nodejs backend.

Good literature is difficult (not always, of course). Just like you can't go from a couch potato to running a marathon in one day, you can't jump from Brandon Sanderson to enjoying Gormenghast (or something like the The Worm Ouroboros). It's impossible. It takes effort, it takes time and it takes a lot of reading to appreciate what the real masters can do with mere words.

If something requires effort to value it, is the value in the thing itself? Or is the thing garbage and all the value is in your effort?

I didn’t think I would see this take on HN of all places. You can’t appreciate Higher Topos Theory before spending a decade’s worth of effort in pure math - does that make much of Modern Algebraic Geometry “garbage”?

Math doesn't exist to be appreciated. Literature has literally no other application.

EUV litography machine is incredibly complex and I would have to learn for decades to meaningfully understand it, yet I can appreciate it knowing very little (of it and in general).

I climb mountains to see the views; the views are there independent of how much effort I put on the path (or how much satisfaction I draw at the end of trek), but I do have to put in the effort to see the views.

Would you take a free mountain lift ride to the top if you happened to come across one during a climbing trip?

would I read the summary of a book expecting the same thing as reading the book?

and if the person who offered you the lift was so obliging to stop at any view you find appealing along the way for how long you desire?

somehow I still think it would be a "no" form you, because it's not really about the views

there is a point where the analogy breaks.

Yes, when it comes to irl mountains you could have a lift that stops along the way. And when it comes to irl books, there is no way to bypass the journey, so to speak.

Also, just a note: it's usually not fun, nor interesting, to quibble and nitpick analogies, that's not what they're there for.

>That's high literature for you.

What is "high literature"? Have you actually read any of the greats? I have, and while I'm not a fan of everything I've read, I never felt inundated with constant metaphors and overly eloquent prose.

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